How it works
Extended standby mode increases the standby time by reducing the background activities when the phone is in standby mode. This is especially useful nowadays, since many popular apps are actually synching in the background all the time, which consumes quite a lot of battery power while your phone is resting in your pocket.

Extended Standby Mode is enabled through the settings in your phone. It’s turned off by default, but you can easily turn it on in the Power management menu.

Turning on Extended Standby Mode on Xperia™ go.

With Extended Standby Mode enabled, most scheduled background activities will be prevented. Fifteen minutes after the screen has been locked, the data is automatically turned off and the background activities will be prevented from waking up since there is no data coming in.

However, you can still receive phone calls, SMS and MMS notifications even though you have enabled Extended Standby Mode. The preinstalled Calendar app and Alarm notifications will work as normal, while the LED will only illuminate to indicate low battery.

When you turn on the screen, the activities will start again. This way, your Xperia™ smartphone will save power by only bringing you notifications when you have time to look at the screen.

Unlike most power save apps available for Android that just turn off data traffic, Extended Standby Mode also prevents your apps from trying to synch data. This is handled in the Android™ AlarmManager, which will not allow apps to schedule wake up alarms during Extended Standby Mode. This method saves more energy than simply turning off data traffic, since it actually pauses all activity in the apps.

How effective is Extended Standby Mode?
Before releasing Extended Standby Mode, we obviously put it through lots of tests – and we found some interesting results. With Extended Standby Mode, stand-by time increased with up to four times. For a heavy user profile, with lots of syncs and downloads, the generic calculated stand-by time is thirteen hours for Xperia™ P, without having Extended Standby Mode enabled.

With Extended Standby Mode enabled, the same user profile as above results in a generic calculated stand-by time of 65 hours for Xperia™ P. This is a substantial increase, which will be clearly notable for you as a user (but please note that these are calculated generic figures that depend heavily on your individual usage).

If we look at some graphs, it’s quite notable that your phone’s CPU is woken up all the time as different apps polls the CPU. The graph below show the power consumption of Xperia™ P in standby mode and Extended Standby Mode disabled. The white spikes represent peaks in the current consumption, which occur for instance when apps are waking up for activities like syncing email, fetching RSS news or publishing location information, just to mention a few examples. Spikes in the current consumption also occur when the modem switches between different base stations on the cellular network, or when it switches between 3G and 2G networks.

If we look at the same measurement for an Xperia™ in standby mode, but with Extended Standby Mode enabled, it clearly shows that the power consumption is much reduced as the peaks are much less frequent, since most apps are prevented from waking up. The few spikes that still remain are caused by things like the modem activities mentioned above, and by apps that are allowed to wake up, for example the calendar.

Now you’ve seen how much power you can save with Extended Standby Mode. So, for all you users of Xperia™ P, Xperia™ U, Xperia™ sola or Xperia™ go, will you turn on Extended Standby Mode? Try it out and let us know what you think in the comments!

By Bukiwe van der Berg

By Nuno Barreto

Hi Sony, i´ve had the Xperia M for about a week and just realized the extended battery option not only stops syncing as it turns WIFI completely off which means i won´t get any msgs or calls from apps like whatsapp, viber or skype which is pretty inconvenient. Is there a way to leave wifi on but not sync the other apps like fb etc… If not it´s really not convenient to have it on as you become unreachable at the time ppl want to contact you.
Hope to hear from you soon.

By HR Rabby

I got a Sony Xperia U and suddenly my xperia u is not charging through Ac wall plug or usb

I started receiving the following error message – “USB devices disabled error”.On clicking it i get the following pop-up “Power consumption by connected devices is increased, therefore, all of them have been disabled. Please disconnect them and try reconnecting”. I get this message even when i try charging it through the plug point. At times the charging symbol appears at the top right side but the red LED light for charging does not come on meaning the phone is not actually being charged

By Harikrishna N

I have the same problem with Xperia SP(C5302). I used Wifi Tethering when the phone was connected to PC via USB. My USB devices become disabled due to power consumption. Now I can neither charge using USB nor connect to PC. Only way to charge is to switch off my mobile, plug the charger to wallout, then switch ON. Please someone help me to enable USB devices….

I have been using this mode since it landed in Xperia S, I am having problem with Alarm and clock, This Mode just turns off the time and time displayed on screen is same since mode gets activated, that is 15 minutes after i stopped using. Thus Alarm set never rings and I knew that this mode is unreliable. And I think stamina mode is way better. As it is customizable. Or Developers should fix this issue.

By Denise Dargan

I have a Xperia SP and I was able to have the phone on standby from 10pm until 7am i.e. there was a blue icon on the top right hand side of the phone. This has now disappeared does anyone know how I can turn this back on.

By Denise Dargan

I have an Xperia SP and from 10pm until 7am my phone was on standby. ie there was a blue icon on the top left hand side. I have now lost that and cannot remember how to turn it back on. Can anyone help

Hi there,
I have an Xperia U which i recently updated to Android 4.0.I activated the extended standby mode, but now i am facing a problem. When i switch on my screen back again and i do get a notification from an application my phone fails to ring i.e. the media sounds are disabled, the phone only vibrates. Even if i disable the feature the media sounds do not turn on again.
Please help me rectify this and let me know what needs to be done at the earliest.
Thank you
Veena S

By John Froederer

This is excellent! But…
I would like either to disable this when plugged into charging or….
keep screen active when plugged into charger (such as when I am using as bedside clock at night using app and alarm clock for morning).
Two uses – 1 – I want tethering to continue when I lock the phone but it is charging AND I want to be able to use this to replace bedside alarm clock. Either display mod or mod to this power saving feature.
Other than that – this is great.
I have Xperia GO (not in selectable list for device when registering)

By Mads Bahrt

Great idea to have a this new system setting to take care of apps that are not developed in a battery concious way. It’s really a great option for those times when you want maximum battery time. It would however be a nice addition if it weren’t an either/or decision. A solution giving you long battery time while still getting some updates in the screen locked state would be nice. It could be realized by a setting where the phone would wake up at regular intervals and allow apps to do a burst of background activity (mostly network activity I assume).

By Yash W

By Sarah Hynes

Hi,
I bought a Sony Experia T and I switched the extended standby mode on about 2-3 days ago. Yesterday I noticed my phone was 3 mins slower then my office computer, which was never the case. Didnt think too much about it then this morning I thought it was 6.50 but in fact it was 7.07 so it was 17 mins slow! I have since turned it off. I presume it has somehting to do with the standby mode?? It has only happened since I started to use it. Any suggestions? Am I doing something wrong??

By Daniel Carrasco

Sony don’t care about Xperia S users, it’s about 200€ expensive than P, but the mobile maybe don’t get updates, and don’t get features like this.

i’m very disappointed about Xperia S mobile, it’s my first sony phone, and maybe the last. That are my reasons:
-I bought this mobile with a sticker saying “Ice cream updatable”, and what was my surprise to see that did not exist such update. I was to wait to Sony about 2 month to get the oficial update, and manually flash it (Movistar did the update in the last 2 weeks, 3 months later).
-Maybe never will get Jelly Bean, from sony. Non official developers have already a working ROM of JB.
-My last mobile was a Nokia 5800, and took support of about 3 years of updates. The new Sony Xperia S is an old mobile in only 10 months of his life.
-The camera don’t meets expectations of a 12MPX camera.

I will try to unlock bootloader to get the updates and new features from 3rd party developers, it’s a shame that I must do to get updates an features.